Sula by Toni Morrison

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secondary to the practicalities of raising her.

Moreover, Morrison overlooks the elements of the absence of maternal love during the early years of Helene and Nel's relationship, but rather focuses the reader on Helene's impeccable behaviour towards her town folk and the "oppressive neatness" of her house. (Morrison,29) which draws the conclusion that respectability amongst the cohabitants of Bottom took precedence over the love Helene shows towards Nel.

In contrast, Sula's household has the same male absence as Nel's but dissimilar in the region of it being all the more chaotic. Unlike Helene, the Peace household has a vast parade of men passing through their home, but Eva's dominance is overwhelmingly apparent as the male characters; for example the Dewey's lives, can be viewed as sexless as well as devoid of truer identities by fact of Eva changing their names.

Furthermore, Morrison's focus on the maternal love (or absence of it) in both households that Eva and Helene ...

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override the sentimentalities of love and this should be enough for Hannah to suffice and not question.

Of course, the settings of the Peace and Wright households are just the hors d'oeuvres and the stage dressing to the theme of love in Sula. More significant are the dynamics of the women living there. Hannah's unemotional attitude towards sex, having a " steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands and her friends and neighbours" (Morrison, 42) shows that emotional love has no place in her life and it becomes a side order to her self-centred pleasures that takes precedence which Sula adopts in her later life.

Likewise, Hannah's disregards the affect that her attitude and actions ...

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